Abstract
In her short story Everyday Use, the African American writer Alice Walker labels her female characters Mrs. Johnson, and her two daughters: Maggie, and Dee by associating them with an animal quality. In my present paper I attempt to show the central and pivotal role played by the mechanism of 'Animal Epithet' in order to investigate to what extent does the writer apply the theory of 'Womanism' to her short fiction's protagonist and the other characters. Walker wants the reader to share her investigation journey in order to find a logical answer for the crucial questions raised in the research-paper: Why does Walker portray female characters by comparing them to animals? How does Walker manage to treat this topic aesthetically? What portrait of black woman does she prove? To answer these central questions, Walker is committed to construct her short narrative work on the base of the key elements of inversion, signifying, and quilting-like. Walker, as a womanist and animal activist is defiant and ridiculous of the mainstream agent of humanism represented by white males. She aesthetically inverts the meaning of the negative, dehumanizing image devised and everyday used by the men of ruling class into aesthetic and positive one to represent the identity of black women.
Highlights
Alice Walker, consciously or unconsciously, insists on describing her female characters as animals
Walker wants the reader to share her investigation journey in order to find a logical answer for the crucial questions raised in the research-paper: Why does Walker portray female characters by comparing them to animals? How does Walker manage to treat this topic aesthetically? What portrait of black woman does she prove? To answer these central questions, Walker is committed to construct her short narrative work on the base of the key elements of inversion, signifying, and quilting-like
Walker is against disfeaturing aesthetics of black woman identity
Summary
Alice Walker, consciously or unconsciously, insists on describing her female characters as animals. ‘Womanish’ refers to courageous, audacious, willful, grown-up, responsible, and serious doings (Walker,1983, p.xi) It is used by Walker as a reaction, opposition, and inversion to the everyday used term which is “girlish, i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious” behavior on the part of black women (1983, p.xi). Commonweal is the state of collective well-being ...black women’s version extends to encompass all humans, but it does not stop there Included in this conception of community is what Taliba Sikudhani Olugbala has called “living kind” (allliving things- from humans to animals to plants, to microorganisms,...).(2006, pp.xxv- xxvi) This fact about ‘Womanism’ can be seen as an eco-perspective. John Gruesser, in Walker’s Everyday Use (2003), refers to animal imagery but does not examine the purpose beyond such technique It just debates over the appropriateness of such imagery to set the rural scene and reinforce these major themes of the story. This current study tries to find the aesthetic purpose behind such comparison between black woman and animal
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